James P. Hogan (19 page)

The woman was somewhere in her mid-forties, Paula guessed. She had fiery hair, almost orange, tumbling to her shoulders in waves, a firm face with high cheeks, a sharply defined brow, an outthrust determined chin, and clear, unwavering eyes. Her body was full and rounded beneath a tan sweater and brown skirt, and her breast heaved visibly as she recovered her breath. She studied Paula’s face for a few seconds, then muttered something quickly in Russian. Although Paula didn’t catch the words, the tone was sympathetic and curious. A wave of eagerness surged up involuntarily inside Paula, something from deep down, reaching instinctively for the promise of a first true contact with another human being since the day she and Earnshaw were captured. She shook her head and explained that she was a foreigner and hadn’t understood.

The woman stared at her. “
Anglicanka
?”

Paula shook her head again. “
Nyet, Amerikanka
.”

“Ah.” The woman nodded slowly and spoke in English, keeping her voice to little more than a whisper. “I heard a rumor of two American spies being arrested a while ago. You were one of them?” Paula shrugged and said nothing. The woman smiled faintly. She leaned closer and rested a hand lightly but reassuringly on Paula’s arm. “Listen to someone who knows them. They will try to frighten you. Don’t let them – it’s just bluff. Stalin has been gone a long time. The fossils in charge of things today are not made of the same stuff. Their whole rotten system is about to fall apart, and they know it. Face up to them. Admit nothing. When they see they can get nowhere, they will give up.”

Before Paula could reply, the colonel who had been speaking on the telephone inside came out. “What is this?” he thundered at the two guards. “The American woman is under solitary detention, She is not permitted to talk with anyone! Anyone! – Is that clear!” He looked at the Russian woman. “And you, high and mighty as you may think you are, you have not been dismissed to go walking about the building. The general is on his way here now.” He held open the door. The Russian woman rose and went back in, carrying herself proudly and without haste. Just before she disappeared, she turned her head and sent Paula a faint nod of reassurance, as if to stress her words. It had been just a matter of seconds, but, maybe because she needed to so desperately, when Protbornov finally called her into the other Boom, Paula felt as if some part of the indomitable strength that the Russian woman seemed to radiate had rubbed off on her. She admitted nothing. They threatened; she defied them. It was the same the next time, and the next.

And finally, as the Russian woman had predicted, the interrogators gave up. They informed Paula one day that she would be going elsewhere, pending further directions from Moscow. She was to be moved, they told her, to a place called Zamork.

With smoke billowing around them from a German tank burning in the street below, two Red Army infantrymen with tommy guns slung across their backs clambered to the rooftop of the shell-scarred Reichstag building in Berlin and unfurled a Soviet flag. The theme music rose to a triumphant crescendo, and the camera closed in on the hammer-and-sickle emblem flying proudly on red against a background of three Stormoviks crossing the sky in formation.

Applause spattered from the more appreciative among the audience as the lights brightened. The Saturday night movie in B Block mess area was over. It had been about a Russian James Bond figure from the days of the “Great Patriotic War,” called Stirlitz, who infiltrated the Nazi SS and sabotaged an attempt by Heinrich Himmler and Allen Dulles, then the head of American intelligence in Europe, to make a separate peace in the West in early 1945. Such an arrangement would have allowed the Nazis to concentrate their remaining forces against the Soviet Union – and after Hitler was removed, the film implied, would have prepared the way for the Americans, British, and Germans to join forces against Russia in a typically treacherous bid to protect their capitalist interests.

The rows in front of the screen dissolved into groups of prisoners dispersing to carry their chairs back to their various billets, and the guards who had been watching from the back returned to their duties. McCain was walking alongside Peter Sargent, when Oskar Smovak caught up with them. “So, there you are,” Smovak told them. “Now you’ve seen it for yourselves – how Stirlitz saved us from you scheming Americans and British. We don’t know how much we have to thank our leaders and the Party for, eh?” McCain never knew whether or not to take Smovak seriously. Stirlitz was obviously fictitious, and the story as depicted bore only a remote connection to the events that had actually taken place.

“You don’t really believe all that, do you?” Sargent said incredulously. From their conversations, McCain had come to suspect that he was connected with Western intelligence, too.

“Stirlitz has become legendary among the Russians,” Smovak said. “A lot of them accept him as real, without any question.”

“Yes, and everything else that it said, by association,” Sargent replied.

“How do you know it wasn’t so?” Smovak challenged. “The Russians get their brand of bullshit. You get your own bullshit. How do you know which is right? How do you know any of it is?”

“When the Moscow Film Studio can make a movie that doesn’t have to be passed by Party censors before you can see it, then come and talk about it,” Sargent said. He upended the chair he was carrying and turned toward the stairway leading to the upper level. The others continued walking to the door of B-3 and entered the billet to a frenzied accompaniment of red flashes and beeps. In the mess area behind them, a deeper note sounded from a klaxon to signal five minutes to go before in-billets – the time for the mess area to be cleared and everyone inside. Lights-out would be one hour later. There was little of the roll-calling that had characterized earlier prison environments. Counting and checking that people were in the right places was performed automatically by remote computers monitoring the electronic bracelets that everyone wore.

Inside the billet, Koh, propped upright at the end of his bunk with an open book, watched silently as the moviegoers trooped in. Rashazzi and Haber were taking turns to scribble on symbol-packed papers Uttering the front table. “Now we need a way of relating
v
-prime to theta, and eliminating
x
-bar,” Rashazzi was saying.

“Use the expression for the work integral,” Haber suggested, rummaging. “Where was it?… Yes, here.”

“Why don’t you two learn a language that other people can understand?” Smovak grumbled as he passed behind them.

“Perhaps we like it better if they can’t,” Haber said pointedly. Smovak raised his eyebrows and moved on.

Mungabo climbed up onto his bunk above McCain’s and clasped his hands behind his head as he lay back to stare at the ceiling. “There’s never any ass in them Russian movies,” he complained. “Nobody cares about all that political shit, and some of the action was okay… but there’s never any ass.” Luchenko moved past the bunk, heading toward the far end of the billet, with Maiskevik and Nolan close behind. “Never any ass,” Mungabo repeated in a louder voice for his benefit.

“Imperialist decadence,” Luchenko tossed back. “That’s all they have to offer.”

“I’ll take it, I’ll take it,” Mungabo murmured, eyeing his pinups.

McCain grinned to himself as he folded his jacket and stowed it in the flat drawer beneath his bunk. Yevgenni Andreyov, who was following, stopped by the end of their bunk. Andreyov was probably around sixty, with patches of white hair on either side of a balding dome, and a white beard, but twinkling gray eyes that could have belonged to somebody thirty years younger. McCain always found him genial, and trusted him more than he did the others at the far end of the billet.

“They brought it upon themselves, you know – the Germans,” Andreyov said. “In 1917 they sent Lenin back so that he would take Russia out of the war. But the state that Lenin created was the one that finally destroyed Germany. That’s irony for you.”

“You seem to know a lot about all that,” McCain commented.

“Yes, well, my father was there, you know – with Konev’s army in 1945.”

Scanlon came in just as McCain turned to head for the washrooms at the far end of the billet. He was carrying a string bag containing grapefruits, which he deposited on his bunk. McCain indicated them with a questioning motion of his head. “A fella who has a friend who works in one of the ag zones,” Scanlon said. “I got them during the movie. It’s legal. You can get your bonus in kind instead of in points if there’s a surplus.”

“I haven’t seen one of those since I left the States. How much?”

“A point…” Scanlon caught the look on McCain’s face, “for two.”

“Capitalist!” McCain snorted.

“Sure, a man has to live.”

McCain picked up the bag containing his toilet gear and began walking through to the far end of the billet. At the middle table of the next section, Smovak and Vorghas were sitting down to a card game with Charlie Chan, the Amurskayan whose name nobody else could pronounce. Chan was slenderly built and studious-looking, with olive skin, slit-eyes, and a pencil-line mustache. He was notorious for his appalling jokes, which the other Siberians seemed to find as hilarious as he did. Behind them the Hungarian, Gonares, was already asleep in his bunk. Gonares was currently on outside work assignment, shifting freight in the cargo bays at the hub. Farther along, a Yakut called Nunghan and an Afghan were experimenting with the latest gambling creation – a pinball game that involved shooting glass marbles up an inclined wooden board to roll down again through an obstacle course of holes and nails. The idea had been Rashazzi’s, who had charmed “the Dragoness” – the stern-faced woman-mountain who ran the OI store – into getting a box of marbles from a children’s toyshop in Novyi Kazan specially for the purpose.

McCain now hardly noticed the strange smell that had greeted him the day he first entered the billet. It was due, he had since discovered, to a kind of wild garlic that certain Siberians, Yakuts in particular, once ate traditionally during the long winters when no other vegetables were available, and now chewed through habit. The scent reeked on the breath and exuded from the pores. “Yes, I know what you mean – we’ve got it, too,” Peter Sargent had said when McCain tried to describe it. “An extraordinary olfaction – fermenting birdseed in a crappy petshop,” which at least conveyed the intensity, if not the precise quality. McCain wondered if they’d bribed somebody in the ag zones to grow a patch of the awful stuff for them specially. He couldn’t imagine its being included in the production lists drawn up by the omniscient planners in Moscow.

On the far side, Taugin, the Frenchman, was stretched out with his head propped on one hand, staring mournfully at a woman’s picture framed on the locker next to him, as he seemed to do for most of his free time. The rest of it he spent prowling morosely about the compound or along Gorky Street. From time to time he would murmur things like, “Mimi, where are you now?” or “Oh, Mimi, where did we go wrong?” – but the name was different on different days, and the pictures changed.

Luchenko, Maiskevik, and Nolan were together in the rear section. On the other side of the table from them, Borowski, the Pole, was getting up from his bunk. In contrast to his Gallic neighbor, Borowski was pragmatic, cheerful, and always willing to help. But how much did that mean? He was still one of the group at the far end, which McCain looked upon as Luchenko’s personal circle. Russia was notorious for nothing being what it seemed. Zamork was a good microcosm of it.

“Profits before people,” Nolan fired at McCain as he passed. “That’s capitalism. It destroys life. There used to be beavers on Manhattan Island. Did you know that? And what about the passenger pigeon?”

“Ask the Siberian mammoth,” McCain said, and went through into the washroom. A moment later he stuck his head out again. “And there’s plenty of beaver in Manhattan. Ask Mungabo.” He disappeared back inside to relieve himself.

The door opened again a second later, and Borowski came in. They stood side by side, staring at the wall. Abominable noises and odors came from the cubicles behind, where two of the Siberians were entrenched. The damn garlic affected everything. “It’s a miracle that Razz’s mice survive in here,” Borowski commented. A flurry of scampering in the cage behind the door acknowledged the remark. McCain didn’t answer. He’d caught the expressions on Luchenko’s and Maiskevik’s faces when he poked his head back out to retort at Nolan. The back of his neck was prickling.

“What did you think of the movie?” Borowski asked.

“Hmm?… Aw, standard stuff.”

“You know, in Russia they teach that it was their entry into the Japanese war that brought victory there, too. But that was only a week before it ended, wasn’t it? Hadn’t America already dropped the first atomic bomb by then?” Borowski saw that McCain wasn’t listening. As he zipped himself up he leaned closer and murmured, “Watch yourself out there.” Then he left.

The sound of flushing came from one of the cubicles behind, McCain re-created in his mind every detail that he could recall of the situation in the end section just beyond the door when he had passed through. Luchenko had been sitting to the right of the end table, about midway along, with Maiskevik standing behind him and Nolan farther back by his bunk. Taugin was on his bunk to the left, and Borowski would probably have gone that way, too, after leaving the washroom. On the table in front of Luchenko there had been a pack of cigarettes, a book, a tin lid used as an ashtray, and at the near end a couple of magazines. Near the far end there had been a large enamel mug almost full of steaming tea, perhaps left there by Borowski. McCain thought carefully; then he opened the door of one of Rashazzi’s cages of mice and scooped a large fistful of feed grain into his left hand.

When McCain came out, Luchenko was still at the table, and Nolan had sat down on his bunk. But Maiskevik had moved to stand in the center aisle at the far end of the table, covering the way through to the rest of the billet. To the left, Taugin hadn’t moved, and Borowski was getting something from his locker. The mug of tea was still standing where it had been. McCain moved to the left to pass by the table.